Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

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Overall, this was fairly interesting until the end. The author very loosely questions whether the association of classical music to villainy is the real reason behind the lagging attendance of millenials in the symphony scene. The piece cites several anecdotal cases, but I couldn't think of a single one from memory that supports this idea. My first thought was Fantasia, which really doesn't fall into this argument.

I grew up as a music student and loved going to the symphony as a kid, so I'm not necessarily the target audience here. But the one thing I notice when I go these days is that sitting through an entire performance challenges my attention span much, much more than it used to.

It's a common theme I've seen around HN, particularly with reading. The symphony isn't really a visual experience (unless they're showing video, which is becoming more common), and it can be really difficult to sit through sometimes, especially if you don't love the music. There are a couple of symphonies I love to listen to all the way, but most have a few exciting themes with several minutes of "meh" in between them IMO.

Yes, the article is definitely overgeneralizing from a number of anecdotes, imho. While I tend to agree with the notion that classical music tends to signal a certain remoteness -- thus correlating with villainy -- that's not its only use in movies.

One example: I recall when Star Wars came out, a lot of my friends bought the soundtrack. It served as sort of a gateway to classical music. It's hard to measure, of course, but I'd bet that that had a larger positive impact on classical attendance than, say, Hannibal Lector killing people to Bach's Goldberg Variations had a negative one.

To your lack of visual stimuli hypothesis, I'd also add as other more likely drivers of classical's decline:

a) Live classical music is expensive and getting more so.

b) Sound quality in a concert hall is different than via digital means. It doesn't wash over you like it does when listening via your Bose headphones. It's less visceral and more distant. And you have to tune out the other sounds of coughing, people shifting in their seats, etc...

c) And finally, we have the best recordings of any work available on demand. In economic terms, that creates really cheap substitutes. Speaking for myself, I'd rather just listen to the Vienna Philharmonic on the couch for free than dress up, drive across town, find parking, and pay $100+ to hear the Austin Symphony play the same work.

> I recall when Star Wars came out, a lot of my friends bought the soundtrack. It served as sort of a gateway to classical music.

Same for my generation w/r/t the soundtrack to 2001

Except that 2001 was already existing as classical music. (Strauss and maybe others.)

That's not up for debate, really here--is it? Rather the pointed argument seems to be that for some of a certain age group, their exposure to the genre was Star Wars. It seems merely in this case, yours was a different movie.

Besides that, there's an important difference between 2001 and Star Wars: 2001 utilized existing classical scores that are excellent for their own reasons, whereas John Williams composed entirely new scores for Star Wars that were similarly excellent.

It is just my personal opinion, but I think it will be a very long time before we see another symphonic movie score that embeds itself so deep into the cultural fabric as Star Wars did. Not only was the music phenomenal and stands well on its own, so many of them are elevated because of the action taking place with them on screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_OSeRxhGOY Still gets me as excited today as it did when I was 8.

> I recall when Star Wars came out, a lot of my friends bought the soundtrack.

I recall Lucas saying in a DVD commentary that he got some push-back in the industry for the idea of using a classical soundtrack in Star Wars.

I’m glad he stuck with it, it’s hard to imagine Empire without the Imperial March.

I think you nailed it; there's relativism at play. Classical music was the vibrant, popular music of its day. It was the showiest kind society had. As that goalpost has moved, classical has become - comparatively - austere. Over the 20th century, but especially the past decade, more and more immediately-satisfying media has come to pull attention (and change tastes) away from the now-slow-burning classical. It's become the vegetables of the music world.

And in contrast, P-Funk, Springsteen, and even younger acts like BTS can do a solid 5-hour set, and still keep the audience engaged the entire time.

I don't think a classical orchestra could even keep me awake for half of that. And I don't think it's because of the source material.

If you traded the string section for fewer musicians with amplifiers, and added more modern instruments, and allowed the musicians to dress with independent fashion and be more mobile on the stage, you could keep the audience going on public domain music alone. It's the conservative image of classical orchestral music that kills it. A violin player strutting around a stage with an electric violin and a red alligator-leather dress that shows some skin is a lot more interesting to me than 8 of them dressed in black and white, seated in a row, and synchronizing their bows.

You could arrange the pieces for one rhythm drummer and a bass drummer, move the melodic percussion to a synth keyboard, cut the brass to one trumpet, mellophone, trombone, and sousaphone, cut the woodwind to piccolo/flute, clarinet, move the double-reed parts to alto and tenor saxophones, and pare the strings down to one electric violin, move the second violin part to electric guitar, one electric cello, and electric upright bass. Then add some guys for the mixing board, and a couple of vocalists with operatic pipes. Now you can play symphonic music in a large venue with questionable acoustics, and show movement and personality on stage.

I grew up in a house where a sibling played brass but (though I did play an instrument) I lacked any sort of "classical" training. I never much enjoyed symphonies but strangely enough did enjoy (parts of) the ones that I'd heard my sister practicing because it was interesting to hear everything else fill in around it and finally appreciate the context.

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